Does anyone else here feel that TailwindCSS is ugly?
Like, I cant pinpoint it, but no matter who uses it and how, even their homepage, it lacks "something"

It doesnt make my heart flutter ya know, the way MDL2 or Fluent Design or even Google's Material3 can to some extend where I want to make something out of it

tailwind feels like licking wet paper

I like material a lot better

Yes, its ridiculous, you might aswell write inline css with the amount of text you need to add the classes for tailwind.

But I think css in general feels messy now.

@ojt-rant I think there might soon be a 'back to vanilla' move in CSS, as there has been with js. Now that there are animations, calculated values and CSS variables available and usable in almost all browsers, an awful lot of preprocessor and framework stuff just looks like unnecessary code masturbation. I can see an argument for pulling in some great looking styling, but not at the expense of significant increases in first load response times and development costs.

Tailwind is the worst thing to happen to CSS since Sass.

Tailwind operates at an entirely different level from the others you're comparing it to. It's supposed to be similar to vanilla, just with slightly different atomic predicates to remove some of the typesetting baggage.

I do wish more people recognized that they don't have the patience or resources for a custom design language and simply adopted fluent or material.

I see tailwind as a very quick way to iterate and create good looking designs. But leaving all the classes there makes it very very ugly. At that point components can be made or abstract a bunch of tailwind classes into a single class and go from there.

It seems to embrace that early in the development process of software everything is chaos and even those that say that know don’t really know (designers…) so it optimizes for ease of change… after things have settled tailwind emphasis on iteration becomes a hindrance!

@lorentz I dont expect an entire design language out of them, but being "ok" is the bare minimum from something so widely-used
Being downright ugly is a hard thing to do specially when you've put this much effort in making it and have so many people involved

@benj it's a good prototyper then? .-. then you layer it up with actual design-focused CSS?

@azuredivay pretty much, that’s been my approach. I make a button/input/card look they way I like it to look, and then throw that in a component/fragment/include and never touch tailwind again.

But then again, I agree with the sentiment of the OP… there are tools that make it easier to make dumb stuff with them, like React or C++/OOP or Tailwind… it takes effort to keep them working on (extra decision, setting conventions, styling guide, etc…)
On the other hand other tools make it hard for you to make dumb things, (try leaving an unused import in Go, or not handle all cases of a switch in Rust…)
Those tools make decisions for you and thus one can just focus on the results instead of having to also babysit the tools so they don’t turn into ugly tantrum-throwing-toddlers

@azuredivay CSS is much more widely used and still ugly, because similarly to tailwind something else is expected to provide the aesthetics.

I consider this kind of frameworks a base for something cool, it helps you to make things faster, but almost in any case I would leave the same style for production final version of a website.
In particular you don't have to lose time to create all grids, margins, paddings, etc.

I usually use spectre.css for this reason, the basic stuff is there, and you can add your style to it very easily.